Andrew Warkentin

Added Astral (astral-os.org), a conventional Unix hobby OS that is feature complete enough to support accelerated 3D and run various applications ported from Linux

Also moved the few PCem VMs (1B, Coherent, and early versions of BeOS) and CTOS (which was previously in MAME, which doesn't emulate a PS/2 mouse in the only PC driver that would run CTOS) to 86Box and updated AIX PS/2 to a newer version of 86Box that fixes the severely glitched blitting

CTOS needed a couple simple patches to get it running in 86Box; these have been merged upstream

Released new Virtual OS Museum base images with the installations I'd recently uploaded to the repository. virtualosmuseum.org/downloads/

Added netOS for HDS/Neoware X terminals based on the Intel i960 to the OS museum. Most X terminals run fairly limited unikernel OSes or the like, but netOS is a heavily customized BSD derivative with a fairly open architecture (it even has a Netscape port).

Which user programs are available is determined by a configuration file, and this is used to create a table of available programs; it doesn't appear to be able to just run arbitrary binaries. However, such external programs seem to be loaded on demand rather than pre-linked into the system at boot.

execve() functions more like execvpe(), looking up programs from the internal table rather than just looking them up normally in the filesystem as in basically every other Unix. I'm assuming this is to allow it to load binaries from a TFTP server, which doesn't support directory listing.

Unlike just about any other functional/genetic Unix I'm aware of, netOS is based on a megalithic architecture with some user programs linked into the kernel image, like the X server and shell, but it is capable of loading external binaries from a disk or remote server.

Also added DX-DOS for the Elektronika BK, a Soviet home computer based on the K1801VM1 PDP-11-compatible microprocessor. While most of the various OSes for these machines somewhat resemble MS-DOS, DX-DOS is the only one of which I am aware that is more or less a true MS-DOS clone

Added BOSS/IX for the MAI Basic Four System 2000, a 68k-based office computer from the 80s. This is a modified distribution of UNOS, a Unix-like RTOS that was ported to various 68k machines. A port of MAI Business Basic is included

UNOS is kind of similar to UniFlex; both are not quite proper functional Unices and have some incompatibilities like a lack of groups, but overall are a lot closer than something like OS-9 or QNX Classic

Earlier MAI Basic Four machines were based on Microdata minicomputers and ran a non-Unix-like OS with a similar Business BASIC to the one in BOSS/IX (I believe this OS may have been a pure timesharing BASIC rather than a more generalized type of OS)

Added Tektronix's distribution of UniFLEX/68k for the 4400 "AI workstations"

Also installed FDDOS for the SORD M20/M23 (a Z80-based home computer from 1982)

Despite the 6.3 filenames and .SAV extension for executables, this OS isn't otherwise all that similar to DEC OSes

Added Tektronix's distribution of UniFLEX/68k for the 4400 "AI workstations"

The Smalltalk-80 environment is bundled; the window system with a terminal emulator is a modern addition; the image is from elektraglide.com. Just like UniFLEX for 6809, UniFLEX 68k is fairly close to being a proper functional Unix but has some significant differences in places

Installed SINTRAN III for the Norsk Data ND-100 minicomputer; this is a real-time and timesharing OS that's kind of comparable to RSX or RTE; unusually, it allows abbreviating filenames in addition to commands

Installed CP/M and LocoScript for the PCW as well

Also installed the SINTRAN-like TPE Monitor single-tasking diagnostic OS for the same machine

Added a few new OSes to the OS museum repository (available as updates; they aren't yet in the base VM). First off is fox32os, the official OS for the fox32 fantasy computer, which is modelled on early Macs and has a vaguely 68k-like CPU

Last is PCVMS, a mid-80s VMS-like OS that runs on top of DOS and extends it (it's kind of analogous to MiNT on TOS or GNO/ME on GS/OS, except that the extended environment it provides is VMS-like instead of Unix-like)

The company that developed PCVMS (Wendin) also had a multitasking DOS (Wendin DOS) that I've downloaded but haven't yet installed, as well as a Unix-like OS that ran on top of DOS (PCUNIX/PCNX, which unfortunately appears to be lost)

Next is MINTIA, an OS with an NT-like kernel and Unix-like shell/commands that also runs on fox32, but originally was written for another fantasy computer, specifically the XR/station, which is modelled on RISC workstations; it also has an x86 PC port github.com/xrarch/mintia

Also installed AISIX, a simple conventional Unix for XR/station from the same developer as MINTIA (it came before MINTIA and was the original OS for XR/station) github.com/xrarch/aisix

github.comGitHub - fox32-arch/fox32: fox32 platform reference emulatorfox32 platform reference emulator. Contribute to fox32-arch/fox32 development by creating an account on GitHub.

fox32os is architecturally similar to Classic Mac OS but also vaguely resembles DOS in a few ways github.com/fox32-arch/f... codeberg.org/fox32-arch/f...

28 Aug

Released a new Virtual OS Museum image including all of the installations I'd added earlier, plus updated A/UX images (the old Shoebill images have been replaced with MAME ones, and the 3.1.1 QEMU image has some minor fixes) virtualosmuseum.org

28 Aug

As always, all updates are available through the update feature of the launcher, so there is no need to re-download if you already downloaded a previous version. No changes to the external scripts have been made, so there's no new external update release

5 Aug

I've released a UX/RT demo image. It includes banner and Hunt the Wumpus from the BSD games package, and runs from the filesystem built into the boot image (no disk filesystem support yet) uxrt.org youtu.be/AVrGQYPbGco andreww591.blogspot.com/2026/08/my-o...

20 July

Got sash working a bit better under UX/RT. Had to fix various issues (mostly filesystem-related) that I didn't catch with the previous hardcoded tests

20 July

Will release a demo ISO and add it to the OS museum soon

13 July

UX/RT finally runs a shell, although many of the commands are currently broken. Once I get more of them working I will release a proof-of-concept binary image and add it to the OS museum.

10 July

Installed the KERNAL for the Commodore LCD, an abandoned prototype laptop based on somewhat similar hardware and software to their other 8-bit machines, although unlike their other machines it boots into a TUI shell instead of straight into BASIC

5 July

Added EDX, one of the OSes for the IBM Series/1 minicomputer, to the OS museum

5 July

It's a general-purpose real-time OS that was often used for process control and data acquisition systems, and is comparable to RSX or RTE (although it's a bit clunkier than either of those, being somewhat similar to other IBM batch-oriented OSes)

25 June

UX/RT now runs a test program that makes a few VFS calls

25 June

Added EOS 3, a German CP/M-compatible OS for the Sharp MZ-3500

I've also managed to get UX/RT running some dummy user programs (one hangs, and the other tries to jump to 0xdeadbeef to produce a distinctive fault)

Getting the first non-trivial test programs working should just be a matter of setting up an IPC buffer and changing the runtime to work with non-root processes

Added UniPlus+ SVR2 for the Torch Triple X, a low-end 68010-based workstation roughly comparable to the AT&T Unix PC and contemporary with it

Torch was a British company that made peripherals for Commodore and Acorn home computers before they made workstations, including Tube second processors for the BBC Micro, one of which was a 68k running System III Unix

The Triple X has an expansion slot compatible with the BBC Micro but is otherwise not based on it.

Added UniPlus+ SVR2 for the Torch Triple X, a low-end 68010-based workstation roughly comparable to the AT&T Unix PC and contemporary with it

However, the Triple X uses the rare Motorola 68451 MMU, which only supports 32 variable-size segments/regions, whereas the Unix PC has a custom MMU with full paging like most other 68010-based machines

The GUI is pretty advanced for the mid 80s and is obviously a clone of that of Mac OS of that era. Like most other Unix GUIs of that era, it is a kernel driver accessed through device files.

Added UniPlus+ SVR2 for the Torch Triple X, a low-end 68010-based workstation roughly comparable to the AT&T Unix PC and contemporary with it

The OS is more advanced than Unix PC SVR2 in some ways; it has symlinks, a built-in IP stack (Unix PC SVR2 had one available but it was a third-party add-on), and a more advanced GUI (called OpenTop)

Added MPL OS, a Unix-like hobby OS for the X68000 (which uses executables in Human68k format)

I've also released an updated version of the base OS museum VM, which includes all the new installations, as well as enabling 4-core SMP for QEMU (which I somehow forgot before). The jumpy pointer with OpenGL has been fixed as well (by disabling the "hardware" cursor)

19 June

Uploaded a video showing the OSes I've added: youtu.be/pg0NCgVDCOg

Also added is a checkbox in the launcher settings to disable nested virtualization for the x86 PC VMs that support it, since apparently it causes hangs on some hosts